How is it there? Looking for answers only from people who are/were Sr. SDM at Amazon.
Brutal
Can you expend?
Why would you leave FB for Amazon? TC and benefits are lower at Amazon.
Pay is good if you last four years but then very few, if any, do. "Brutal" is a pretty good word. But it's a high bar to get hired at L7. They're a tough, gritty bunch.
Why only few L7s make it? Do you talk from experience? Is that what data shows?
I know multiple L7s and L8s. Very few make it to four years.
Stressful at times, lots of delivery pressure, but an incredibly powerful and impactful role, at least in a tech org. In non-tech orgs where engineering just lives to serve business needs, your mileage may vary. As with all jobs, who your manager is (usually a director, sometimes another senior manager) matters immensely.
What makes it stressful?
VP and directors leaning on you to ship faster when you are already riding your teams as hard as you can without losing your best engineers, lots of cross org escalations from customers and stakeholders, tons of upward communication meetings (risk reviews and launch readiness, quarterly business reviews, etc.) but you need to keep auditing your teams and managers in the thin slices of your time in between all the other meetings, making time for lots of skip level 1:1s to keep pulses on your teams while doing all of the above. Basically, meetings are 30+ hours a week and you have to fit everything else in the rest of the time.